Scalapino's Front Matter

Leslie Scalapino's The Front Matter, Dead Souls as a Proactive Historical Reconsideration

In order to reconsider history, one must assume that a history exists in the first place. Certainly, such an assertion sounds absurd; history continues to be taught as a self-contained subject in public schools, and universities also continue to offer students the opportunity to pursue a major in this subject. Yet the idea of what is meant by history today has grown complicated. As Jean-François Lyotard explains in his "Missive on Universal History," the idea of a history is constructed according to a universal metanarrative or a determinant sequence of events, and this storied sequence necessarily presumes a specific organizational principle which, in turn, excludes those people who do not fit into the notion of who precisely are represented by "we" whenever that "we" claims to have "a" singular history (23-6). Consequently, the broad range of narrative strategies for explaining cultural idiosyncrasies within each given cultural group undermines all notions of universality, and the idea of history fractures into a multiplicity of other possibilities.

Leslie Scalapino's novel, The Front Matter, Dead Souls, might thereby be considered according to what Lyotard's translators (Don Barry, Bernadette Maher, Julian Pefanis, Virginia Spate, and Morgan Thomas) define as the "postmodern text" being "in advance of itself [... or] writing written in the what will have been of the future anterior. It will be both premature (without presumption) and patient (awaiting the event of thought)" (ix-x). In this manner, Scalapino's journalistic improvisation on events which occur during the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the subsequent presidential campaign allows for a consideration of her novel as also a proactive historical reconsideration which inexorably inhabits a persistent passage of time.

Scalapino grounds her text within what she refers to as an "action of events-that is life, not dreamed-, that is only present," and what she intends by this must be understood to include how corporately controlled media and status quo political rhetoric work to manipulate public perception of current events (2). Her text acts thus originally as an antithesis to both the media production of the Persian Gulf War and also the way in which this war was used to boost the president's popularity, and she accomplishes this by conceiving of her own writing as a media event within an adjacent and subjective present. In her own words, "The Front Matter, Dead Souls is a serial novel for publication in the newspaper. Its paragraph-length chapters can also be published singly on billboards or outdoors as murals. Parts of it were submitted to various newspapers during the election campaign, though not accepted" (1). Her novel, therefore, was and continues to be intended as a form of public activism. In the first place, it initially occurs as politically savvy piecework, an editorial gesture in conjunction with the reelection campaign of George Bush the 1st. Later, with the inclusion of the introduction and the collection of parts within the form of a book, the text also becomes a reconsideration not only of the events surrounding the Persian Gulf War, but also of the way in which we as individuals allow ourselves to construct any such similar events as part of our "own" storied selves.

Likewise, her serial construction allows for a contextual elasticity and a political expediency. The fragments she refers to as "paragraph-length chapters" are meant to work both within the overall scheme and separately: "A sentence might be such a chapter [...]," she claims (1). This ability to extract pieces of the text and submit them subverts habitual expectations dependent upon a determinant narrative organization:

A hundred and seventy thousand infants maybe died
there from starving or disease after the bombings.
A crowd here wearing yellow ribbons is crying for infants
to be forced to be born. (20)

As can be seen in the excerpt, the brevity of her "paragraph-length chapters" allows for a quick and easy reading should such a paragraph be spotted upon a billboard, although what is actually meant remains to a certain extent ambiguous. Perhaps anti-abortion activists are portrayed as overtly hypocritical, but the number of infant deaths as modified by "maybe" seems to undermine the credibility of the speaker. At the same time, the anti-abortion activists might appear to condone the killing of children elsewhere while categorically opposing abortions at home, but the yellow ribbons, while implying that the activists support the soldiers, does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that these same people are in favor of the war.

Nevertheless, the exaggerated number of infant casualties insinuates, even when modified by "maybe," that bombing initiates a humanitarian crisis. So too, the issue is raised that such numbers are seldom (if ever) reliably reported, and that the average consumer of war information is always left guessing. As a form of counter-propaganda, this section transcends the ambiguity to effectively compromise the idea that any war was or is conducted as a humane response to the evil dictator, Saddam Hussein; at the least, it raises questions about the legitimacy of launching what Steve A. Yetiv refers to in The Persian Gulf Crisis as "the most severe, concentrated air attack in strategic history" (34). And this legitimacy becomes even more questionable when considering the environmental aftereffects of depleted uranium, "300 metric tons" of which are reported by John M. Miller to "remain in Kuwait and Iraq" (135). Yet once the first paragraph comes into conjunction with the second, the shallowness and hypocrisy of opposing abortion while otherwise supporting a brutal bombing campaign seems to prevail, and innocent civilians (many of whom are children) are dehumanized as merely collateral damage.

In a related sense, Scalapino undercuts and complicates the manner in which the Persian Gulf War was promoted as a response to Iraqi brutality:

Kuwaiti royalty, hundreds of whose guest workers as itin-
erant labor suffered from their imperial yoke and in the after-
math of the war were executed with no trials or fake ones, has
to pay to go to bed with Bechtel.
That's why the war took place. Bechtel beds Kuwaiti
royalty. (52)

While not precluding the fact that Iraqi soldiers were responsible for atrocities in Kuwait, Scalapino conflates Kuwaiti royalty and human rights violations with Bechtel, an American company which received, according to Daniel Robicheau and Saul Bloom's chronology, "Doing Business: The Arming of Iraq, 1974-1993," a "contract from Iraq for a $2.5 billion petrochemical plant" in July of 1985 (334). At the same time she implicates unnamed members of the United States government:

Some of our government officials are drawn from the
ranks of Bechtel in fact. (Scalapino 53).

Not a lot unlike the current Cheney/Haliburton scandal, Bechtel links corporate interests with political power in the form of George Schultz, who, "prior to becoming Reagan's secretary of state, [...] had served as Bechtel's president" (Robicheau 328). This contract occurs during the Reagan/Bush administration, Bush being the same man who later becomes president and works so hard to liberate Kuwait from the Iraqis and then runs for reelection while Scalapino simultaneously composes The Front Matter, Dead Souls. The implication is that of a rather nasty business in which thousands of innocent people are sacrificed so that those who already possess the means to rule others continue to consolidate both power and wealth. Within the parameters of Scalapino's text, Iraqi atrocities fail to eclipse Kuwaiti human rights violations and, in turn, these violations become simply one other facet of an endemic cycle of violence and corruption in which powerful political figures in the U. S. are held perpetually accountable.

Scalapino, consequently, prepares a Dantesque punishment, a permanent textual punishment from which no escape is allowed and which applies as well to the some of the most immediate beneficiaries of power, the presidents' wives. While in real life such people seem beyond the reach of the law, within the world of Scalapino's text they are condemned to a hell of their own making and remade in the image of hyenas which roam and ravage a blasted landscape of raging oil lakes aflame:

A hyena drifts by in front of the sun, in a business suit. (4)
. . . . . . . .
Hyenas trotting on the blackened ground in oil drag a
woman crumpled in black robes. Another entirely covered with
no eyeholes runs with the bristled hyena swiveling lunging with
thrust muzzle that tears her robe. The president's wife trotting
up disembowels her and runs with the intestine. (44)
. . . . . . .
The former first lady trotting and then pulling with her
muzzle her legs shaking trembling as she's dragging the wieners
out of a woman on a field far away runs to a cobalt cloud with the wieners. (out on the plain).
This contains no violence as it is empty and real. (82)

While the overall impression is that of something both grotesque and peculiar, these passages are also moderately funny, but the humor remains dark. At the same time, cultural imperialism is both enacted and critiqued. The object of the wrath of the hyenas seemingly happens to be an Islamic woman, a woman hidden inside of her robes and who appears otherwise helpless. She is completely at the mercy, though none is forthcoming, of hyenas who might be wearing suits, as well as "the president's wife." Although the reality is not immediately apparent, it is instead implicit within the cultural stereotypes and the complete failure to see in the other a fundamental humanity; and thereby the aggressor forfeits her own.

Curiously, however, the government officials never have names; even the president becomes here another faceless bureaucrat, and this omission is key to understanding Scalapino's postmodern historicity. While some of the fictional characters are named, Dead Souls (who has "been impregnated by the president") and Defoe, for instance, the repeated appearance of politicians in conjunction with Bechtel reinforces the notion that these people belong to the corporation, and that their identities are likewise of lesser importance (47):

The president's down on his knees in a car with the head
of Exxon.

The war was for Bechtel, the company.
Why do they try to proscribe people's love?
The motorcade is a long line of wallowing limousines in
which are the real heads of state, who're from Exxon, Bechtel,
and other industries. Some at the same time own the branches
of the news media. (47)

Here the very idea of the president is deflated, and even without the obscene pun on "head," he is caught in an inherently compromising and pornographic position. Although the initial sentence in this selection might be read ambiguously, the idea that the "head of Exxon" is also down on his knees is remote. These guys are probably not praying, and the reader cannot help but read this as the president performing fellatio upon his corporate superior. Again, this might be funny if it were not so symbolically accurate. But this selection contains a more insidious claim, and that has to do with these corporate powers owning and controlling the distribution of information and how history is thus constructed.

As a reconsideration of history, Scalapino's text includes and yet pushes beyond even the proactive, and it does so by allowing the bureaucratic thugs to remain anonymous. While the idea that "what will have been of the future anterior [... as] both premature (without presumption) and patient (awaiting the event of thought)" seems twisted and almost incomprehensible, it is only a habitual dependency upon narrative and linear organizational principles which makes it so (Barry et al. x). To construct an argument as intrinsically based upon a thesis and a so-called "logical" development of textual evidence unfortunately falls into this linear habit and therein masks the actual displacement of authority at work in Scalapino's text. Instead she creates a perpetual present, and today appears much the same as it did during not only the Persian Gulf War, but also during that one known simply as "Vietnam." Bechtel might become Haliburton and then again Exxon, and one presidential election appears much like all the others. Such distributions of power leave the average person nearly hopeless, and democracy seems merely a distant idea now deformed into a rhetorical club with which our "leaders" bludgeon our foes, whoever those foes happen to be at each given moment.

Despite the most dreadful lessons of history, Scalapino ultimately supplies an inkling of hope, and she does so through a naming of poets and references to their work: "Eileen Myles still / no image // in campaigning to be president when she is a poet there is our country's absent marginalia [...]" (3); "Mei-mei Berrsenbrugge's Sphericity, the writing can 'see' when a point is silent [...]" (19); and "Robert Grenier's drawn superimpositions of a drawn phrase in one color on another phrase in some other color (so it's only its visual being) are the actual horizon line on the edge/meaning of the written poetic line" (57), among others. At this point she (re)places those who actively engage democratic informational alternatives within an unwieldy historical flux. In reply to the following scenario:

These men at a party were backbiting viciously.
They work themselves into a lather of hatred. Ads are the
form of modern spatial sense.
They're to induce seeing nonrealistically what is actually
there: to produce our manipulated perception as the condition
and ground for it. (43)

Scalapino offers to readers, and thereby the world, a sustainable alternative of poet/ambassadors, and she does so in the tradition of William Blake, a poet of prophecy who furthermore maintained in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell the following:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern. (Blake 39)

In the beginning so stretches the end. The poets take back and reinvent the language, for the real information is always extant. We simply need to know how to find it.


Works Cited

Barry, Don, et al. "Translator's Forward." The Postmodern Explained. Jean-François Lyotard. Eds. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1992. ix-x.

Blake, Willaim. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. New York: Doubleday, 1970. 33-44.

Lyotard, Jean-François. "Missive on Universal History." The Postmodern Explained. Trans. Don Barry, et al. Eds. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1992. 23-37.

Miller, John M. "Depleted Uranium: Radioactive Residue in the Desert and the U. S." Hidden Casualties: Environmental, Health, and Political Consequences of the Persian Gulf War. Eds. Saul Bloom, et al. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1993. 134-7.

Robicheau, Daniel, and Saul Bloom. "Doing Business: The Arming of Iraq, 1974-1993." Hidden Casualties: Environmental, Health, and Political Consequences of the Persian Gulf War. Eds. Saul Bloom, et al. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1993. 134-7.

Scalapino, Leslie. The Front Matter, Dead Souls. Hanover NH: Wesleyan, 1996.

Yetiv, Steve A. The Persian Gulf Crisis. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1997.